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Use One Big Server (2022)

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Re: Use One Big Server (2022)

#311

Post by kapone »

toast0 wrote: post #269
kapone wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's putting a longer server in the rack above/below yours and pushing the power plug out of the back of your server Are you serious? Have you ever built/operated/wired rack scale equipment? You think the power cables for your "short" server (vs the longer one being put in) are just hanging out in the back of the rack? Rack wiring has been done and done correctly for ages. Power cables on one side (if possible), da…

Yes I'm serious. My managed host took several of our machines offline when racking machines under/over ours. And they said it was because the new machines were longer and knocked out the power cables on ours. We were their largest customer and they seemed honest even when they made mistakes that seemed silly, so we rolled our eyes and moved on with life. Managed hosting means accepting that you can't inspect the rack…

I hope that "managed host" got fired in a heartbeat and you moved elsewhere. Because they don't know WTF they're doing. As simple as that.

Re: Use One Big Server (2022)

#312

Post by icedchai »

dijit wrote: post #293
icedchai wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I haven't seen a company that hired DBAs in over 15 years. I think the "DevOps" movement sent them packing, along with SysAdmins.

Sysadmins never left, they just got rebranded.

I actually agree with this. I meant you never seen roles with the "system administrator" job title, not that it actually disappeared as a function. DBAs on the other hand, I do think that has mostly been absorbed into other roles.

Re: Use One Big Server (2022)

#313

Post by HankStallone »

brazzy wrote: post #231
tgtweak wrote: post #216

I've been doing hybrid colo+public cloud for over a decade and it's always been the most cost effective route at a certain scale. That specific break even point is lowering over time with the density and cost effectiveness of hardware. Sure you need net/infra admins but the software and hardware these days are pretty management friendly and you'll find you still need (often more expensive "cloud") admins so you're no…

Colocation to me means you buy your own hardware and rent only the rack space (and power and connectivity) from the datacenter. Is that really what you're talking about? If so, why do you choose this over renting bare metal servers?

I went with buying and colocation because I found I sleep better this way than when I used to rent servers in a distant datacenter and have to count on techs I'd never met working on hardware I'd never seen if anything went wrong. In my case, I live near the datacenter, so I can be hands-on fairly quickly if something goes wrong that I can't handle remotely.

And I can do whatever I want with the hardware. When I bought my servers, they came with disk controllers with non-optional RAID, as almost all of them do. I wanted to run RAIDz2 in FreeBSD/ZFS, so I swapped in non-RAID controllers. They were just a few bucks, but having that ability meant I could choose from a wider range of servers.

Re: Use One Big Server (2022)

#314

Post by throwaway7783 »

ozozozd wrote: post #141
throwaway7783 wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably not for $200/mo EC2, but AWS/GCP in general * Centralized logging, log search, log based alerting * Secrets manager * Managed kubernetes * Object store * Managed load balancers * Database HA * Cache solutions ... Can I run all these by myself? Sure. But I'm not in this business. I just want to write software and run that. And yes, I have needed most of this from day 1 for my startup. For a personal toy proje…

You need database HA and load balancers on day 1? You must be doing truly a lot of growth prior to building. Or perhaps insisting on tiny VMs for your loads?

HA is for availability. I don't want downtime for my enterprise customers. Are your customers okay with downtime? And as soon as you have more than one nodes, you need some kind of a load balancer in the front.

Re: Use One Big Server (2022)

#315

Post by throwaway7783 »

swiftcoder wrote: post #150
ozozozd wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You need database HA and load balancers on day 1? You must be doing truly a lot of growth prior to building. Or perhaps insisting on tiny VMs for your loads?

> Or perhaps insisting on tiny VMs for your loads? This happens way too often. Early-stage startups that build everything on the AWS free tier (t2.micro only!), and then when the time comes they scale everything horizontally

I'll repeat what I said above. It's for availability (aka I don't want my customers screaming at me if the machine goes down). And no , scaling out was not our first solution, scaling up was. I have considered going bare metal so many times, but the number of things we need to build/manage by ourselves to function is too much right now.

Hopefully when we can afford to do it, we will.

Re: Use One Big Server (2022)

#316

Post by throwaway7783 »

eska wrote: post #147
throwaway7783 wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably not for $200/mo EC2, but AWS/GCP in general * Centralized logging, log search, log based alerting * Secrets manager * Managed kubernetes * Object store * Managed load balancers * Database HA * Cache solutions ... Can I run all these by myself? Sure. But I'm not in this business. I just want to write software and run that. And yes, I have needed most of this from day 1 for my startup. For a personal toy proje…

Now imagine your solution is not on a distributed system and go through that list. Centralized logging? There is nothing to centralized. Secrets management? There are no secrets to be constantly distributed to various machines on a network. Load balancing? In practice most people for most work don’t use it because of actually outgrowing hardware, but because they have to provision to shared hardware without exclusivi…

Maybe I'm dumb. I am not even taking about distributed systems here. I'm taking about basic high availability configuration. Two web servers, two (or three) db server instances for HA. I have had paying enterprise customers from day 1, and I don't want them screaming at me for systems going down.

And as soon as you have two of anything, all the above start mattering.

If none of this actually is an issue for you and your customers, I'll say your are very lucky.

Re: Use One Big Server (2022)

#317

Post by throwaway7783 »

b112 wrote: post #166
eska wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Now imagine your solution is not on a distributed system and go through that list. Centralized logging? There is nothing to centralized. Secrets management? There are no secrets to be constantly distributed to various machines on a network. Load balancing? In practice most people for most work don’t use it because of actually outgrowing hardware, but because they have to provision to shared hardware without exclusivi…

Not to mention scaling. Most clients I know never, ever have scaled once. Ever. Or if they do, it's to save money. One server means you can handle the equiv of 100+ AWS instances. And if you're into that turf, then having a rack of servers saves even more. Big corp is pulling back from the cloud for a reason.

I mentioned this in an earlier comment. It is dumb to be on the cloud at a large enough scale.

Re: Use One Big Server (2022)

#318

Post by throwaway7783 »

troupo wrote: post #154
throwaway7783 wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably not for $200/mo EC2, but AWS/GCP in general * Centralized logging, log search, log based alerting * Secrets manager * Managed kubernetes * Object store * Managed load balancers * Database HA * Cache solutions ... Can I run all these by myself? Sure. But I'm not in this business. I just want to write software and run that. And yes, I have needed most of this from day 1 for my startup. For a personal toy proje…

> For a personal toy project, which in reality is any project under a few hundred thousand users

.. who are okay with services going down here and there

Re: Use One Big Server (2022)

#319

Post by HankStallone »

benjiro wrote: post #214
gethly wrote: post #144

I run on VPSs as well. I ditched cloud a long time ago. Once my project starts making money, I will definitely buy my own hardware and collocate. Cloud is like dating apps. We had fun for a decade but it's time to get serious and get some things actually done and be productive again.

> I will definitely buy my own hardware and collocate. Even colocation is often fraud with issues. I shall not mentioned the plectra of dead hardware from datacenter electricity failures. Ironically, my home has more stable electricity then some datacenters lol . Unless you running a business where a few minutes downtime will cost you millions, most companies can literally run their own servers from their basements.…

Sometimes I wonder why I'm not running my servers from my home, considering my 1Gb fiber has 3ms latency, and a good UPS would get me through all but a couple of the longest power outages I've had in the last 15 years. As long as I'm hosting small business web sites or something like that, and not critical banking or hospital systems, there's no reason it wouldn't be fine.

When my colo contract runs out in a couple years, I may seriously consider it, especially since they're already talking about offering bigger bandwidth packages.

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